KiOR: The Inside True Story of a Company Gone Wrong. Part 4, the Year of Living Disingenuously

Cannon admits a problem

On the afternoon May 18th, Stamires met with Cannon at his office, and recalled that “Cannon admitted that there were indeed certain serious problems and he was thinking to hire a new senior person with management experience reporting directly to him, to help him specifically address the problems.”

“By this time, KIOR practically had no funds left to keep its doors open,” Stamires told The Digest, “and after four years of intensive R&D work, KiOR did not have a scalable and economically feasible technology. Knowing the real test results, management should have stopped lying to the public and investors, changed the technology and re-designed the Columbus plant.”

By July, three groups had access to the Demo data and analyzed it. Loezos and Chen, Charlie Zhang and Dennis Stamires, and Professor Vasalos from CPERI. All three teams came to the same conclusion: the yields were far below the 67 gallons per ton that management was claiming in the IPO documentation.

Zhang and Dydak delve into the yield crisis

Agnes Dydak and Charlie Zhang were KiOR chemical Engineers who had worked at the Demo Unit and also at the Columbus Plant. Zhang did the original development work of Bio oil Upgrading / Hydrotreating for producing the Diesel and Gasoline fuels at the PARK Lab in Pittsburg, and worked on the development of processes to separate more efficiently the oil from the water phase coming out from the Reactor. Zhang also had for a period been night shift process supervisor at the Columbus Plant’ production of Bio oil.

Dydak was a Senior Process Engineer analyzing the DEMO Plant’ data. Using a process simulation modeling program, she was forecasting what will be the bio-oil yield at the Columbus Commercial plant when in operation. This was critical since the reactor was 50 times larger at Columbus.

Her forecasts were devastating.

The model predicted that the production would drop from an average yield of 37 gallons per ton at the Demo plant to a range of 17-21 gallons per ton at Columbus. She reported her finding to her supervisors. A team member familiar with the response said that Hacskaylo and Loescher directed her not to publish the results of her Computer process simulation and yield prediction results of the Columbus plant, and not discuss them with anybody else.